Stevia, is a natural sweetener derived from a plant. It is becoming a well-known option in many U.S. health food stores. A native of Paraguay and a member of the sunflower family, the stevia plant is botanically known as Stevia rebaudiana. The plant is also referred to as Bertoni, after the Italian botanist, Moises S. Bertoni, who first studied stevia in 1899 (www.emperorsherbologist.com/steviahist.shtml). Taken as a whole, the leaves of the stevia plant average about 30 times sweeter than sucrose (Information taken from Wisdom Natural Brands stevia product brochures). Scientists have isolated and named a number of individual sweet compounds within the stevia plant, chiefly including stevioside, steviobioside, rebaudiosides A, B, C, D and E, and dulcoside A. The sweetness of these purified substances varies between 50 to 450 times that of sucrose. (Stevioside, the most commonly-used extractive of stevia, is about 300 times sweeter than sucrose) [Alternative Sweeteners, Third Edition. Lyn O’Brien Nabors (Ed.)].
Stevia leaves and stevioside are virtually calorie-free, beneficial in the prevention of cavities and do not trigger a rise in blood sugar. They are not only safe for diabetics and hypoglycemics, but in some countries stevia leaves are even prescribed as a medicinal substance for these conditions because they normalize pancreatic function and thus aid in the metabolism of sugar (www.gene.ch/gentech/1998/May-Jul/msg00060.html).
The whole stevia leaves contain a number of beneficial compounds, including ascorbic acid, calcium, beta-carotene, chromium, cobalt, iron, magnesium, manganese, niacin, phosphorus, potassium, riboflavin, selenium, silicon, sodium, thiamin, tin and zinc (Information taken from Wisdom Natural Brands stevia product brochures). It should be noted that only whole stevia leaves have nutritive benefits. Stevioside extracts merely function as a sweetener and pass through the body undigested, although they do possess anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties (www.wisdomherbs.com/faq/stevioside.htm).
When applied topically, the stevia leaves also fight acne and speed wound healing while also reducing the formation of scar tissue (Information taken from Wisdom Natural Brands stevia product brochures).
While natives of Paraguay have used the stevia plant for many centuries, the western world has also had a few centuries of experience with this sweet plant, dating back much earlier than Bertoni’s time. Spanish Conquistadors of the sixteenth century learned about stevia from the local Guarani and Mato Grosso societies, who used it to sweeten teas and herbal medicines. Early European settlers sweetened foods, teas and other beverages with stevia, and Gauchos (the local version of what we might call cowboys) in the region of Paraguay later used it as a sweetener.
In the early 1970s, the Japanese government and regulatory agencies began to take a distinct stand against artificial sweeteners, especially aspartame, due to their possible health risks. After conducting extensive tests on stevia and stevioside, they accepted it as a safe alternative and gave it government sanction for widespread usage.
By 1977 the Maruzen Kasei Co., Ltd. started extracting stevioside on a commercial basis in Japan. For over 25 years now, the Japanese have used stevia and its extracts as a table top sweetener, in soft drinks, baked goods, pickles, fruit juices, jams and jellies, candies, yogurts, pastries, chewing gum, sherbets, toothpaste and tobacco products. It has reportedly captured over 50% of the Japanese sweetening market,(www.emperorsherbologist.com/steviahist.shtml) even though the Japanese technically classify it as a food additive. In all this time, there have never been any reports of toxicity or adverse reactions to its usage. Stevia is also used as a sweet food additive in South Korea, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, and as a dietary supplement in China, western Europe and the U.S. (Alternative Sweeteners, Third Edition. Lyn O’Brien Nabors (Ed.)).
Stevia did not have a very easy entry into the U.S. market. The earliest introduction into this country was probably in the late 1970s or early ‘80s. Although the FDA had not ruled on stevia one way or another at that time, a provision in federal law allows for the food industry to make a self-determination of Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status for items with a long history of “common use in food” prior to 1958, providing that it enjoyed widespread use without any apparent adverse health effects.
There was relatively little popular awareness of stevia at that time, but a handful of food producers were including it in their products under that most nebulous of categories—“natural flavors.” Among those marketing or developing products containing stevia were the Lipton Tea Company, Celestial Seasonings, and Traditional Medicinals, as well as a host of smaller firms. One of these smaller firms was a Utah-based nutritional products company by the name of Sunrider International.
In 1985, Kerry Nielson was director of operations at Sunrider. (The reader is advised to recall that this was the same time period during which G D Searle & Company and Monsanto were winning major victories toward FDA approval of aspartame. Whereas the patent on aspartame was extremely lucrative for these companies, it is impossible under U.S. law to hold a patent on a naturally occurring substance.) Nielson and his company were among the first to feel the regulatory backlash directed at stevia and its purveyors.
Sunrider, which had recently begun marketing a stevioside sweetening product called Trusweet, was informed of a trademark infringement complaint filed by the NutraSweet Company against their product. Notwithstanding the baseless nature of this complaint, Sunrider knew that they did not have the economic resources to fight a legal battle with NutraSweet. Rather than do so, they changed the product’s name to Sunectar and hoped that this would resolve the issue. But this wasn’t the end of Sunrider’s legal problems with stevia.
Not long afterward, the U.S. Department of Agriculture paid a visit to the company’s headquarters. As Mr. Nielson himself recalls, “I thought it was strange because they asked specifically to see the stevia [whereas normally] they would just go through and have a look at everything…. When we took them over to the area where we had the stevia, the inspector dug out a bunch of red tags and started slapping them on everything.” The stevia was all burned and the company was instructed to cease and desist from any further importation. The only explanation given by the inspectors for this action was “suspicion of adulteration,” which usually means contamination of some sort.
However, the inspectors did not take any samples of the stevia with them in order to test for contamination.
Sunrider continued to meet with FDA stonewalling on the matter and eventually gave up on the idea of using stevia as a sweetener, opting instead to formulate a less-controversial skin-care product containing stevia. Once this change of course was established, the FDA dropped its embargo and relinquished all concerns over its “suspicion of adulteration.(“Sinfully Sweet?” article from New Age Journal, Jan/Feb. 1996, by Linda and Bill Bonvie).
It was around that same time that the Arizona-based Wisdom Natural Brands company began having problems with stevia products as well. Jim May, founder and president of the company, had even gone so far as to submit test samples of stevia to the FDA to assure that it would be okay to use it in the company’s products.
Initially, May received confirmation that there would be no problems with importing the whole leaves of the plant or a liquid concentrate of stevioside. However, the FDA later reversed course and ordered the company to stop importing all stevia products. May recounts that he was told in a phone conversation with the FDA that (once again) the NutraSweet Company had been behind the complaint. (The FDA and NutraSweet both deny that NutraSweet ever had any involvement in the FDA’s actions.) May, who had only been selling between $100 and $200 worth of stevia per month, says that he was also told by one FDA agent that “if [the FDA] wanted to make carrots [be] against the law, we could do it.” (Ibid).
One of the next major targets would be the Colorado-based tea company Celestial Seasonings. In the mid 1980s, representatives of an “anonymous firm” lodged a trade complaint with the FDA, charging that the Celestial Seasonings company was using stevia extracts in four products which were therefore “adulterated.”
The company responded by formally petitioning for stevia’s GRAS status and presenting the FDA with substantial evidence that stevia had a long history of safe usage. The FDA declined to even process the company’s petition and continued to pressure them to stop using stevia, as well as to turn over the names of other companies which were using the controversial sweetener Under continuing harassment, Celestial Seasonings relented on both counts (Ibid).
It would preserve some small measure of the FDA’s dignity if these had only been isolated incidents, or even if they were the worst incidents of their kind…but it gets worse. In 1991 the FDA began to escalate the whole matter to the level of a War on Drugs, issuing “Import Alert Number 45-06,” which declared stevia an “unsafe food additive” and prohibited its import into the U.S. (It is interesting to note that the text of this document mentions that stevia “has been used throughout history” without any mention of negative side effects.) (www.emperorsherbologist.com/steviahist.shtml).
It was in that same year when a gang of armed federal marshals raided the Arlington, Texas warehouse of businessman Oscar Rodes, served him with a warrant, and proceeded to seize and burn his most recent shipment of stevia and stevioside powder for use in natural teas. (“Sinfully Sweet?” article from New Age Journal, Jan./Feb. 1996, by Linda and Bill Bonvie). The FDA has even gone so far as to raid health food stores suspected of selling stevia products and to order the confiscation of books which refer to stevia’s potential use as a natural sweetener (www.gene.ch/gentech/1998/May-Jul/msg00060.htm).
At this point, a number of companies and individuals began to seriously address the task of seeking FDA approval through formal, procedural channels. Lynda Sadler, president of the California-based Traditional Medicinals herbal-tea company, along with the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA) and an attorney by the name of William R. Pendergast, started to work on persuading the FDA that the marketing of stevia should be permitted based on its having been used safely and widely in food prior to 1958.
Pendergast and the others submitted more than 900 articles to the FDA, documenting that the herb has been used safely for “hundreds of years” by “millions of people.” The FDA said that they needed more specific and scientific information, so the Herbal Research Foundation did extensive scientific research to address specific FDA concerns. The FDA stonewalled this information and dragged their feet until Sadler, the AHPA and Pendergast were finally forced to drop the matter, which was draining much time and money.
The Lipton Tea Company then picked up the cause in 1994, submitting a 2-inch thick petition for GRAS status. Despite Lipton’s credentials within the food industry, they met with similar bureaucratic resistance. In this case and the previous attempts by Pendergast et al., the FDA ignored their usual protocol and refused to even file the petitions for approval. Once a petition is filed, the information submitted becomes available for public review during the same time period in which the FDA is reviewing it. This would have left the FDA in the position of having to publicly defend its actions, something which they were unwilling to do. In one meeting with FDA officials, an AHPA representative asked what amount of information would be required for submission before the FDA would formally file a petition.
The FDA’s Direct Additives Branch chief, Eugene Coleman, replied: “This may sound flippant, but we [will] know that number when we see it.” (“Sinfully Sweet?” article from New Age Journal, Jan./Feb.1996, by Linda and Bill Bonvie).
On the rare occasions when someone managed to get a straight answer from an FDA official as to their bizarre stance towards stevia, the usual reasons have been suspicions of toxicity and/or a possible adverse effect on fertility. (Some sources also say that the FDA refuses to label any natural substance as a sweetener unless it is a carbohydrate.) (“Lo Han: A Natural Sweetener Comes of Age” article from Whole Foods, June 2003, by Peilin Guo and Dallas Clouatre). These allegations are based upon two studies—a 1968 rat study and a 1988 mouse study published in a Brazilian pharmacological journal.
The first of these two was conducted in Uruguay by a Purdue University biochemist named Joseph Kuc. While the FDA interprets this study as casting reasonable doubt upon the safety of stevia, Kuc himself has gone on record as saying that his results are not supportive of these claims. While the rats in the study did suffer from the effects of toxicity and from a reduction in the numbers of offspring, Kuc points out that they were fed the entire stevia plant, not just the sweet leaves. The Brazilian study involved an overly-small group of mice and suffered from a number of methodological and design flaws. The study documented only very scant information about the quantities of stevia which the mice consumed and how it was prepared.
The FDA has also alluded to several South American studies which have supposedly questioned the safety of stevia, although they admit that they have never even been able to acquire copies of these studies. It should be noted that the extensive scientific studies conducted on stevia by the Japanese have not indicated any toxicity or reproductive hazards. ( “Sinfully Sweet?” article from New Age Journal, Jan./Feb. 1996, by Linda and Bill Bonvie).
In September of 1995, after much thankless effort on the part of many parties, the FDA finally relented by revising their 1991 Import Alert with the issuance of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Under that law, stevia was cleared for import into the U.S., providing that it only be labeled and used as a dietary supplement and not as a sweetener (www.emperorsherbologist.com/steviahist.shtml). This allows U.S. companies to use and sell stevia, but only by walking the narrow line of not implicating it in any way as a sweetener.
The official status of stevia has not changed as of the time of this article’s publication, but the future of this contentious little plant is being shaped in very exciting ways. Despite the best efforts of the establishment to hold it back, there exists something of an informal “underground” of those who seek to vindicate stevia and openly market it as a sweetener. The Price Foundation itself is playing a role in this cause, but one of the most well-known advocates is Donna Gates, author of The Body Ecology Diet. Gates openly champions the cause of stevia as a sweetener and has stated that she will go to jail, if necessary, to win the FDA’s approval.
There are also some exciting possibilities brewing in Canada, where stevia may be sold as a tea but not a sweetener. A Vancouver company by the name of Royal-Sweet International is developing a stevia sweetener which they plan to export into the booming Asian market, a move which just may attract the attention of other corporate interests. Also, there has been talk of growing Canadian stevia as a cash crop, possibly even replacing Canadian tobacco (“Sinfully Sweet?” article from New Age Journal, Jan./Feb. 1996, by Linda and Bill Bonvie).
To summarize, while we will all have to wait to see what the future holds for stevia, we should not wait to begin using it and reaping its benefits. It is available at your local health food store. If you purchase an extract, look at the ingredients and select one that uses inulin as a filler, not maltose or sucrose, such as Sweet Leaf ® or Stevia Balance® Brands. Inulin, unlike maltose or sucrose ( and others) can affect your glycemic index and consequently, your blood glucose.
For more information on stevia, the reader is advised to read the book The Stevia Story: A Tale of Incredible Sweetness & Intrigue, by Bill and Linda Bonvie and Donna Gates.
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